The liver cancer which occurs in 74.8 males and 15.6 females based on 100,000 Korean middle-aged men and women (40-60 years old) is a disease with the highest mortality rate leading to 24.1 deaths in 100,000 people per year (according to the data from National Cancer Information Center, Korea in 2013).
Currently, the best way to treat liver cancer is by means of surgical resection and liver transplantation. However, in the case of liver transplantation, it is difficult to find donors, whereas in the case of surgical resection, the number of patients on whom the surgery can be performed is limited to within 20% of all patients. Thus, they are not suitable as a method for treating all patients with liver cancer.
Other treatment methods include systemic chemotherapy, hepatic artery chemoembolization, hepatic artery chemotherapy infusion, and radiotherapy, etc., but these treatments not only kill liver cancer cells but also normal cells, giving rise to a fatal side effect.
In addition, it has been reported that Nexavar, which is the world's first oral therapeutic agent typically used for the treatment of liver cancer and which contains the ingredients of sorafenib, has caused side effects such as reduced pancreas when taken over a long period of time. Therefore, studies on liver cancer therapeutic agents without causing side effects have been actively conducted.
On the other hand, ginsenosides are a class of saponin in ginseng, and there exist more than 30 kinds of ginsenosides. According to their structures, they are classified as PPD (protopanaxadiol) and PPT (protopanaxatriol), and they are known to exhibit different pharmacological activities depending on their chemical structures (Curr Vasc Pharmacol. 2009 July; 7(3):293-302). Among the ginsenosides, the minor ginsenosides which are present in a very small amount in ginseng are difficult to isolate, and thus their research is insufficient.
Accordingly, the present inventors have made extensive effort to find a composition which exhibits an excellent therapeutic effect on liver cancer, and as a result, they confirmed that ginsenoside F2 can inhibit the formation and proliferation of liver cancer without affecting the normal cells, thereby completing the present invention.